The Return of Reagan - Bill Clinton's spending on defense

Here we are, more than seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the United States is spending more money on the Pentagon than it was two decades ago. The Pentagon has a budget that exceeds that of the next ten biggest militaries combined. And still the Joint Chiefs demand more, and still Bill Clinton gives it to them. This money is a waste--just more candy for the kids at the Pentagon, more cake and ice cream for the contractors.

This bloated Pentagon budget doesn't make us any safer. In fact, some of it--like the renewed Star Wars program--places us in more jeopardy.

When Clinton announced at the beginning of the year that he was boosting Pentagon spending by $110 billion over the next six years, he obliterated one more distinction between Democrats and Republicans. His proposal, the largest increase since the days of Reagan, sounded an all-out retreat.

"He finally caved," says William Hartung of the World Policy Institute. "It's an abdication of his responsibility as commander in chief. He's afraid to put them on a budget. It's the worst time to have someone like that in charge." Hartung believes Clinton surrendered to the Joint Chiefs "partly because he was never confident running the place, and partly because he's looking to give Gore some political cover."

The camouflage for this increase in Pentagon spending is to raise the pay of the men and women in the armed services. But that's misleading. "Overall, it's being sold as a way to give more money to the troops and for readiness, but one of the main goals is to spend more on unneeded, gold-plated Cold War relics," says Christopher Hellman of the Center for Defense Information. "It calls for spending more than $6 billion for replacing fighter aircraft that already are the best in the world." Other procurement items are equally unnecessary, he says. There is money for a new and improved nuclear aircraft carrier and for maintaining the fleet of eighteen Trident nuclear submarines, even though the Navy said it could get by with ten back in the Bush Administration.

The strategic rationale for this gargantuan Pentagon is still the two-war theory: that the United States should be prepared to fight two wars overseas at the same time. Pentagon strategists under Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Bush Administration, "more or less worked backward," says Hartung. "They said, `If we want a force of this size, what threat would we need?'"

Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, takes issue with the two-war strategy. "It's very unrealistic," he says. "The assumption behind it is that while the United States is fighting one enemy the other enemy would take advantage of us. But no one took advantage of us during Korea, or Vietnam, or the Persian Gulf. And the reason is, you don't start a conflict against the major superpower just because you might have some short-term advantage since, in the long term, we'll come back and clean your clock."

Other conservatives have come out against this level of spending. "It's totally unnecessary," says Ivan Eland, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has harsh words for the Pentagon officials who insist they are so strapped for funds that they can't pay their personnel. "It's like you're buying a mansion and then complaining you don't have enough money to mow the lawn." He agrees with the Center for Defense Information that upgrading weapons systems is silly. "We don't need new attack submarines. We already have the best submarines in the world."

So if increasing Pentagon spending is unjustified, why is Clinton proposing it? "Clinton wants to nullify the military issue," Eland says. "The Democrats have to guard against being perceived as weak on national security. And the Republicans don't seem to understand that Pentagon spending is government spending. And, let's face it, there are a lot of vested interests here."

Eland adds that Clinton is "weak vis-a-vis the military. He has problems with his service record, so they have more leverage over him."

With Clinton offering so much to the Pentagon right off the bat, it may end up getting even more. "The bidding war is just beginning, and no one is going to be bidding any lower," Hellman warns.

A day after his State of the Union address, Clinton also gave ground on Star Wars. Defense Secretary William Cohen announced that the Administration would spend $6.6 billion over the next five years on a national missile defense system to guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

A fantasy of Republicans since Ronald Reagan first proposed it, a national missile defense system may sound good at first--who could be against protecting the United States from nuclear attack?--but it makes no sense upon close examination.

First, the technological hurdles are extremely high. The Pentagon has already spent more than $50 billion on a missile defense system "that has yet to deploy

or successfully test a single reliable device," Hartung wrote recently in World Policy Journal. "In fact, the most impressive products to come out of our $55 billion, fifteen-year investments in missile defenses to date are the flashy `artist's conceptions' of how mature systems might work, which the military services and defense contractors duly trot out whenever Congress threatens to cut back the Star Wars budget."